[B-Greek] /sh/ sound
Chet A. Creider
creider at uwo.ca
Tue Jan 6 08:10:07 EST 2004
At 10:37 PM -0400 1/4/04, Brent Hudson wrote:
>On 1/4/2004 at 5:20 PM Ted Shoemaker wrote:
>>How best would you express the English /sh/ sound
>>in ancient Greek?
>
>
>The Hebrew Shin in proper names is often changed to a double sigma in
>Greek translation (e.g., "Nashon" =3D NASSWN; Yashay =3D IASSAI; =
Menashsheh =3D
>MANASSHS, & Mashiach =3D MESSIAS, to name a few). I don't know how
>consistantly this was done throughout the LXX.
And Carl Conrad wrote:
>Interesting! I've hypothesized (knowing that I cannot demonstrate it's
>true) that Attic intervocalic -TT- represented the sound of English -tch-
>or -ch-, while analogous Ionic intervocalic -SS- represented the same sound
>as English -tsh- or -sh-. These double-consonants normally derive from a
>guttural followed by an iota consonant, sometimes from a dental followed by
>an iota consonant: e.g. KHRUTTW/KHRUSSW (proclaim) from KHRUK-YW (sounding
>like American English KAY-ROOTCHO or KAY-ROOSHO) or PRATTW/PRASSW (enact)
>from PRAG-YW (sounding like American English PRATCHO OR PRASHO) or
>MELITTA/MELISSA (honey-bee) from MELIT-YA (sounding like American English
>MELITCHA OR MELISHA). While phonetic processes don't necessarily work out
>the same way in all related languages, I've noted the way that Latin
>NUNTIUS becomes Italian Nuncio (pronounced NOON-CHEE-O.
The only direct claim for this I've ever seen is in __An Introduction
to NT Greek. Tutor's Manual_ by Alison Balaam and Frank Beetham.
Duckworth 1994: "SS is pronounced _sh_ as in _she_ (p.7)." I have no
idea where these authors' notion came from. They refer to the JACT
_Reading Greek_'s pronounciation in the section from which the quote
comes, but in fact, _Reading Greek_ says that SS was pronounced as in
_disservice_ (p. 262). However, Carl has some very good company for
his surmise as Carl Buck (Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin, pp.
140-1, writes, "The SS...TT represents a dialectic differentiation of
some double fricative which was the result of _ki_, etc. [as Carl
says]. Just what this was (for example, _shsh_ or fricative QQ?) must
remain obscure.
Despite these conjectures, the consensus is that SS was simply as long
S. E.g. Sidney Allen in _Vox Graeca_, 1968 ed., writes (p.58): "there
seems therefore no need whatever to assume that the TT of Attic or the
SS of other dialects mean anything more than they appear to.
Closer to home for us, Moulton in Moulton, Howard, Turner, vol 2, pp.
107-8 writes, "Normally [sade(h)] was S, [zayin] was Z, as we might
expect, [shin] and [s'in] being also S, since Greek had no means of
differentiating."
Chet Creider
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